The Scouting Guide to Survival

Be Prepared! Time-tested advice on emergency preparedness. An official publication of the Boy Scouts of America!

Each year hundreds of outdoor enthusiasts find themselves in an unexpected outdoor emergency. They get lost, injured, or stranded. Cut off from the rest of the world, they have to depend upon their survival skills to survive.

For most people, thanks to modern communications such as cell phones, satellite messengers, and personal locator beacons (PLB), it is merely a sobering two- or three-hour adventure. However, for some who did not take the proper precautions before they left home or do not have survival skills, it can end in tragedy.

J. Wayne Fears uses his Army and Air Force training to make sure that everyone in the outdoors remembers the Boy Scout motto “Be Prepared.” His practical advice offers help with:

• How to build a fire
• How to purify water
• How to identify common edible plants and mushrooms
• How to signal for help
• How to build simple shelters
• Practical navigation skills
• And so much more!

Since 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has helped build the future leaders of this country by combining educational activities and lifelong values with fun. The BSA is committed to training youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities.

The Boy Scouts of America provides the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training, which helps young people “Be Prepared. For Life.®” The Scouting organization is composed of nearly 2.4 million youth members between the ages of seven and twenty-one and approximately 960,000 volunteers in local councils throughout the United States and its territories. For more information on the Boy Scouts of America, please visit www.scouting.org.

J. Wayne Fears is a wildlife biologist by training who has organized big-game hunting camps, guided canoe trips, and run commercial getaway operations. Former editor of Rural Sportsman magazine, he has written more than more than twenty books on a variety of subjects ranging from cabin building (including How to Build Your Dream Cabin in the Woods) to survival (The Pocket Outdoor Survival Guide) to cookbooks (including The Complete Book of Dutch Oven Cooking), and more than four thousand articles for major outdoors magazines. A member of the International Dutch Oven Society and an accomplished writer and skilled outdoorsman, Fears lives in Cross Creek Hallow, Alabama.